


at the edge of midnight

by crookedspoon



Series: Exchange Fics [85]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Altered States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captivity, Consent Issues Exchange 2020, Forced to Watch, Kidnapping, M/M, Multi, My First Work in This Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/crookedspoon
Summary: Kuwei and his father are held in the Ice Court. In the beginning, they only came for his father. He would give them nothing. It was only a matter of time until the Fjerdans came for Kuwei instead.
Relationships: Kuwei Yul-Bo/Original Male Character(s)
Series: Exchange Fics [85]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/51139
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Consent Issues Exchange 2020





	at the edge of midnight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> Canon-divergence in which Bo Yul-Bayur does not die at Ahmrat Jen but is instead taken to Fjerda with Kuwei.

In the beginning, they only came for his father. Kuwei would wait for hours, huddled into a corner of his cell, imagining the worst. Until they brought him back, sometimes ragged and bleeding, other times shaking with fright, but always alive. His father would smile when he saw him, a tiny, tremulous smile, not showing any teeth because his teeth might be stained with blood, yet a smile nonetheless. For some reason, that smile only amplified Kuwei's feelings of guilt.

"You don't have to do this," he told his father, knowing that his words are futile. His father chose to defy their captors, nothing more, nothing less, and none of his protests would make him change his mind.

"I can't give them what they want. _Jurda parem_ was a mistake."

A mistake. Not only that, but it was Kuwei's fault, too. If he had not been born a Grisha, his father would not have had to invent a drug that would help him to suppress his powers. Kuwei understood the necessity, but understanding did not make it any easier to bear. It was why the Fjerdans had come after him and his father, why they were keeping them locked up, why they were torturing his father. They would continue to do so until he gave them more _jurda parem,_ or until he died. Those were the only outcomes.

There was nothing Kuwei could do but to endure the captivity alongside his father, and the lack of options made him sick with grief. Not least because the Fjerdans had Heartrenders at their command. They could do anything to his father. On _jurda parem,_ they could tear him limb from limb, then put him back together only to do it again. Kuwei had to remind himself that they would not: his father might well die of shock, and he was too valuable a hostage to waste on cruelties like that. But Kuwei's imagination liked to run away with him. Not being able to see what the Fjerdans did to his father when they took him away was somehow worse than being forced to watch. His mind filled in the gaps with acts more gruesome than what was actually done.

Still, the saints in their unending wisdom were merciful. It turned out that although Corporalki were able to puppet bodies, there was one thing they could not do. They could not actually control thoughts or force discoveries. _Jurda parem_ was a puzzle that could not be coaxed out of Kuwei's father with a simple command. He did not know its formula by heart and so the Heartrenders could not order him to simply make new batches of the drug; he would have to replicate the experiments he'd recorded in his notebooks first. And in order to do so, he needed the full range of his mental faculties without outside interference. 

It was only a matter of time until the Fjerdans would switch tactics and come for Kuwei instead. He wasn't needed in order to make the experiments work, after all.

Unlike with his father, they didn't separate them. They forced his father to watch. Of course. Kuwei had been too naïve to factor himself into the equation sooner. He was leverage, and the Fjerdans were going to apply pressure to him next.

Kuwei had expected pain – if not the worst torture he could imagine, then at least something leading up to it. He did not expect... this. At first, he was beginning to feel warm, sweat trickling down his temples despite the chill of their surroundings. His heart was beating faster. They were not going to boil him alive, were they? That was perhaps the last rational thought he had – the last thought he could remember, at any rate – because his focus was slowly being eroded. As strange as it sounded, he felt... good. For the first time in months, he was completely without fear or worry. All that was there, was a pleasant feeling in the back of his mind that grew and grew like something stretching after a long nap. He'd never felt anything like it, and yet it seemed familiar somehow, not alien at all.

He ran his hand over his tingling face. It came away slick with sweat and tears. His vision swam. Dimly, he was aware that his body had begun moving on its own. He was writhing, every brush of his own clothes had become too much. It fanned the flames that had spread across his body. A part of him was surprised his clothes hadn't caught on fire yet. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered when he could feel this good.

It was ecstasy. Pure, unadulterated ecstasy, the like of which he could never have experienced on his own. His hand clapped between his thighs, to grind his palm against his hard length, and already his trousers were sticky with his own essence, yet the onslaught of pleasure did not subside. Kuwei thought he would go mad with it. Already he was gasping and drooling, his heart knocking against his ribcage so wildly he thought it might give out any second.

And then everything simply – stopped.

One moment he was soaring higher than he would have imagined possible, the next he was robbed of his wings. He didn't even plummet so much as crash land with a sickening jolt. And all he could think of was what he had just lost.

He had no words left to beg. Still, he wailed plaintively, dragging himself over to where the one of the Heartrenders stood, himself the picture of being eaten alive by bliss. Barely older than Kuwei, he was skin and bones, but he shone with a light Kuwei envied. Every inch he dragged himself across the cold stone floor was agony, his skin still alive with the pleasure he'd experienced just before but already suffering from its absence.

It was only when his father gathered him in his arms and whispered his apologies that Kuwei noticed they were alone. His outstretched hand dropped to the floor and he would have wept if he remembered how. As it was, tears trickled down his face, though whether they were his own or his father's, he couldn't tell. Once he found his voice again, he begged all night for them to return.

It was only a taste. To make him docile. To break his father by breaking him. They came every night after that, and every night, Kuwei abased himself further. Just for another moment of that ecstasy the Heartrenders could give him. What did the rough hands matter that tugged him this way and that? If he cried the first time they stripped off his clothes and penetrated him, he cried tears of pleasure. In the beginning, his father had yelled at them to stop, which in turn had made Kuwei beg harder for them _not_ to. Now his father musts have seen the error of his ways, because he was crying tears of pleasure, too. His body sagged the way Kuwei's did when the Fjerdans were done with him. This was all they could take for the moment, but they would be back they assured him. Kuwei would have thanked them, had he breath left enough to do so.

Everything changed when the last Heartrender had run out of _jurda parem_ to use on Kuwei. He stumbled as the guards pushed him into the laboratory that doubled as Kuwei and his father's cell. He fell to his knees. He crawled toward Kuwei.

"Please," he croaked. 

Kuwei had never managed to get a good look at him. His mind had been consumed by pleasure. Even now, the Corporalki was barely more than a pale shape of hollow cheeks and lank, reddish hair falling over his sunken eyes. He radiated heat and desperation.

"Please, I need more."

"Yes," Kuwei whimpered, feeling the strain of having gone too long without the bliss that this Heartrender had induced in him a mere day before. "More."

They begged each other for something they could not give. Kuwei could not give the Heartrender the _parem_ he so craved, and without it, the Heartrender could not alter his brain chemistry the way he had.

"Please," Kuwei whined as he drew the Heartrender closer. Even weak as he was, it took no effort at all. 

The other boy weighed almost nothing, as if his bones were hollow. He flinched away from Kuwei's touch, but as soon as he noticed what he'd done, he swallowed and bore Kuwei's beseeching hands. It was futile to beg him, of course. Only his father could help them both.

The Fjerdans knew it and they never passed up a chance to drive that point home.

"If we had _jurda parem,"_ they said, patting his head, "you could feel that way again." 

Kuwei nodded eagerly, soaking up their words like parched soil soaks up water. Of course he'd beg his father to create the drug for them. He would do anything to feel that bliss again. He had barely made the connection when the pleas tumbled out of his mouth.

Vaguely, he was aware of the sadness in his father's eyes, but he did use the laboratory the Fjerdans had set up for him as far as Kuwei could tell. He was in agony, but his father was working on a solution. All he had to do was be patient. His father would not fail him. He was sure of that.

His confidence crumbled like so much dust the day the Fjerdans announced that his father had been too slow: even their last Heartrender had died from withdrawal. Once the implication sank in – that Kuwei would no longer be able to feel the mind-numbing pleasure he'd been subjected to – he howled in misery. It was only later, when the pain had eased somewhat and he could see more clearly the horror of those days, that he felt the shame of his outburst in his bones. A Grisha had lost his life because of a dangerous drug his father had created and all Kuwei could think about was that he would no longer be able to soar those heights he'd become addicted to.

The Fjerdan guards, taunting him for his addiction, dangled other possibilities in front of him. They could make him feel as good as before they said, stroking his hair, his back, his shoulders. "Pretty thing," they called him. "Like a doll. Could be fetching a hefty sum in the brothels for his exotic coloring." Something about the way they touched him stirred faint memories of what he had lost – and made a mockery of it. Instead of blissful, he felt... a mixture of different things. Shame, revulsion, but also hope. A hope that he could reach the same heights without the help of the Heartrenders.

He couldn't. When the guards rubbed their cocks against his face, his feelings were more of desperation than elation. He knew it wouldn't be the same, but he had to take his chances. It wasn't easy. No matter how much he tried to suppress the thought that said he might never again feel the high he was scrambling for, it wouldn't go away. It hovered in the back of his mind, oozing anxiety with every passing minute. He put his efforts into sucking the cock of the guard in front of him; a dim part of him remembered having done so before, but he had been in no state to pay attention to what he had been doing. It was difficult when he couldn't quite disappear into it.

If it had only been his mouth the guards would be using, he might have managed, but the fingers probing his ass felt too intrusive to ignore. He needed this, or he thought he did, yet at the same time his anxiety grew. Everything felt wrong somehow, even if it felt good. Kuwei kind of liked having a cock in his mouth, but he didn't like the way the guard was gripping his hair and thrusting against the back of his throat. Before, Kuwei had felt no discomfort. Everything the Fjerdans had done was drowned out by the intense joy that had coursed through him. His body remembered that feeling and was trying to compensate, but it was a sad trickle compared to the raging torrent from before.

When the other guard finally penetrated him, Kuwei would have sobbed had he been able to. Not because it hurt, not really, but because the sense of alarm that shot through him dashed even his last shred of hope that he might be able to recreate the bliss he so craved. The tears flowed freely after that. He had no more strength to fight them. He let the guards use him as they wished, not protesting anything, but not participating either. Several times that night, his body experienced peaks of some kind, but it would be too much to call them pleasure, pale shadows that they were.

He woke up on his cot later, freshly washed. His hair was cold and damp. Kuwei touched his face, expecting to find it still covered with copious amounts of semen, but it was unsullied. Kuwei did not feel unsullied. His father must have cleaned him. This thought might not produce the stab of guilt he had become accustomed to, but he still didn't relish the thought of his father having to go through all that because of him. 

Kuwei stared up at the shadowed ceiling above him, physically wrung-out and emotionally dead, bereft of even the possibility of feeling joy again. His father was still bent over his beakers, even though it must be well past midnight. Kuwei wanted to curl into a ball, but he didn't move. What he really wanted to do was sink through the floor or vanish into thin air. He could not even begin to contemplate the shame he had brought on his father through his mindless actions. He only knew that it was too great for him to ever meet his father's eyes again.

"Forgive me," Kuwei murmured, and his father looked up. "You never wanted to give them _parem,_ but it seems I have forced your hand." Because he was not strong enough. Because he had let an addiction guide him.

"Kuwei," he said gently. Sadly. "My son. I should be the one to ask _your_ forgiveness. I have failed in my duty to protect you. I will not fail again. If giving them _jurda parem_ is what it takes to stop them from coming for you, then that is what I must do, may the saints forgive me."

"You can't," Kuwei protested, if weakly. His heart leapt in anticipation and he licked his lips. He still avoided his father's eyes. A part of him wanted him to give them the drug. The bigger part of him.

"I must. Perhaps I can make it safer this time. Saints willing, I might even find an antidote. There is so much to study." Under his breath he added, "They should not have to suffer so."

"Do you think the Fjerdans are going to let you study?"

"I do not know." His dark expression, however, said that he very much doubted that they would. The Fjerdans had not exactly been treating them as guests. Why would they treat his father as a researcher now if they had not done so before?

But perhaps... perhaps he could help his father. The guards had called Kuwei a fast learner, among other things he would rather not remember. His cheeks heated. They seemed to like using him. Perhaps they might like to continue to do so, in exchange for favors. 

"We will find a way," his father said.

Kuwei nodded, trying to project confidence he did not feel. For now, it was all he _could_ do.


End file.
